Sep 2, 2009

Oprah Puts Michael Moore in Deep Freeze [Marketing Follies]

With the premiere of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, looming on September 16th at the Toronto Film Festival, normally you'd expect to find Moore filling up every inch of media, shocking the bourgeiouse with his trademark Angry Guy Banging on the Palace Walls shtick, providing Matt Drudge with a new outrageous quote every news cycle.

When Goldstein called Overture Films, Moore's distributor to arrange an interview, he was told that the filmmaker would sit for interviews after the premiere, but the pieces would all be embargoed Sept. 23rd, the day the film opens in New York and Los Angeles.

Why? Because Moore is doing a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, which won't air until Sept. 22. And if Oprah wants an exclusive, she gets it, since when it comes to books, movies or music, no one offers a better promotional platform than La Winfrey.

There is perhaps no bigger winner here than Barack Obama, who is trying to persuade America that his health care package is not a socialist takeover of their lives. He will get a precious few weeks wherein Michael Moore is not clogging up the airwaves with his caricature of Middle American GOP fears. A conspiratorial mind might even wonder of Miss Winfrey is slyly doing her old pal on Pennsylvania Ave. a solid.

But for Moore himself, it turns out, even when you are peddling an attack on the entire economic underpinnings of our civilization, there is no place to get that message out like the couch of the Grande Dame of the Midwest, Our Oprah.